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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With COVID restrictions and efforts to curtail the spread of the virus, it's been rough going for so many companies. We all know that, but you know who's had a great year? Amazon, the second-largest private employer behind Walmart in this country. You might be looking for Cyber Monday deals on Amazon right now.

Well, here are some numbers to give you a sense of how good a year they're having and how many jobs they're creating. In 2020, the company has added more than 427,000 jobs and an average of 2,800 jobs a day since July 1st, according to an article this weekend in the New York Times. Here's another number. Last year, the week of Cyber Monday, brought more than 600 serious injuries to workers at Amazon warehouses according to reporting by my next guest. He is Will Evans who covers workplace issues for Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. Hi, Will, welcome back to WNYC.

Will Evans: Hi, thanks for having me on.

Brian: What happened last year during the week of Cyber Monday?

Will: Incredible amount of injuries. This is when injuries spiked for Amazon workers at fulfillment centers fulfilling those orders for Cyber Monday. It's one of the Cyber Monday, this whole week, their workers are preparing for this for weeks, and they are under an intense amounts of pressure to get an incredible amount of packages out the door. This is when these work injuries happen. Ironically, it's something that the company has actually denied repeatedly saying that injuries don't go up during the holidays.

Brian: What kinds of injuries did you discover to be most common, and how did you discover them if Amazon tries to hide them?

Will: These injuries are often musculoskeletal injuries. People are hurting their backs and their shoulders and their knees, and getting repetitive strain injuries like tendonitis or carpal tunnel. They're pushing through the pain, the injuries are getting worse. Many times they can be pretty debilitating where people end up with chronic pain. These injuries are happening because the exhaustion and the speed and the pressure to go so fast, people take shortcuts, and they end up injuring themselves, or boxes fall on their heads, they overreach, they bend the wrong way.

The injuries are recorded on logs that the company has to provide to the government, but keeps confidential, otherwise. We were able to get a leak to us injury data going back four years from more than 150 fulfillment centers around the country. We could really fact check what Amazon had been saying about its safety, and found that the company had been misleading the public all along.

Brian: Any Amazon workers, especially at warehouses, happen to be listening right now? Do you want to call and add to Will Evans from Reveal and the Center for Investigative Reporting? They're reporting on safety protocols for this incredibly intense holiday season, which is just obviously starting for shopping via Amazon (646) 435-7280, here on the Cyber Monday, or you can tweet at Brian Lehrer.

Will, 600 serious injuries is a lot to be sure, but if there are hundreds of thousands of workers at these warehouses around the world, is it only a tiny fraction? Is it different from an injury rate which should be zero, but it's never going to be zero, at facilities like these?

Will: Yes. Let me give you a sense. The numbers on hiring that the New York Times cited, those are global numbers. I'm looking at specifically US fulfillment centers. These are the places where when you order, they're picking your order, they're picking it out from the shelf, they're packing it in a box, and sending it out the door. Specifically, at those warehouses, we saw across the country, the injury rates were more than double the industry average. More than double what the warehousing injury gets for injuries is where Amazon is.

Amazon is actually getting worse. Over the last four years, that injury rate has been going up. To give you a sense that the New York Fulfillment Center in Staten Island had an injury rate of about 10 injuries per 100 workers, so it's about 1 in 10, that's double the industry average.

Will: One of the interesting things to me from your reporting is that the company has said automation is making work at its warehouses safer, but you say the numbers tell a different story and that injury rates are even higher at Amazon's robotic warehouses than at its traditional sites. Why would that be if robots are doing more of the work?

Brian: It's interesting. It's a little counterintuitive. The robots make everything more efficient and faster, and that Amazon then uses that efficiency and speed to crank up the expectations of the workers. Instead of workers walking miles of warehouse floor to pick out that order for you, they're standing at their workstation and robots are bringing it to them. It seems like it might be easier that way, but instead of having to pick out, say, 100 orders an hour, they're now expected to go through up to 400 or more orders an hour. They're going faster. It's the repetitive work, it's the exhaustion that sets in after 10-hour shift, the repetitive strain. Because the robots can make things so efficient, those productivity expectations keep going up and up.

Brian: You're really saying automation causes additional hazards. It's not just the case of correlation?

Will: Yes, that's what we hear from workers even from safety managers. I've talked to a lot of former Amazon safety managers who say, "Look, we can't solve this injury problem at Amazon because we can never lower the productivity expectations. It never gets slower, always gets faster. The robots are helping to add to that speed, which is the Amazon way." There's no way they can really address the injury problem if they can't address that.

Brian: Let's take a phone call from David in Inwood, West Virginia, who says he just quit working at an Amazon fulfillment center. David, you're on WNYC. Hello from New York.

David: Hey, Brian, [unintelligible 00:07:43]. I live in West Virginia. The Amazon fulfillment is in Virginia. Basically right now, I couldn't handle the job that lasted a year and a half. I got arthritis in both shoulders, tendonitis in the elbow. That company literally does-- You don't speak to the manager until you're hurt, or until you-- Their screen on their little laptops blinks your name on it, because the way they go about it, like you said, you will be written up. I got written up for being 98.7% of my work being done, that's a weird writeup, but yes, you will get written up if you miss a single box for the hour.

I went for medical leave. I went to a doctor, they told me while I'm seeing the doctor, that Amazon man is a guy who deals with payments for disability, call me to deny me in front of the doctor while he's on loudspeaker. Right now I'm about to go to court because the fact is I got the doctor's statement, and she said like, "I've never seen this guy before. It's my first time. He's only been in my room five minutes." The guys on the phone denying me my benefits before I even got to see the doctor.

[unintelligible 00:08:46] you do get hurt, they do not care. If you don't quit or request a medical leave [unintelligible 00:08:52] you will be written up even if they know you're hurt. You really are number two. You do not meet your managers unless that computer screen blinks. You literally go in, punch in, go to your position, and that's it.

Brian: David, I'm sorry to hear about your injuries. I wonder if there's any light you can shed on-- Bless you. Was that a sneeze?

David: Yes.

Brian: It's very rare to sneeze on the radio. You're in very limited company. Is there any light that you can shed on what it was about your job that you think caused the injuries that could have been prevented by better structures?

David: It's [unintelligible 00:09:30] it's just basically they work you hard. They've got a Macy's Fulfillment Center over here that my other family works at, and nobody has a problem at Macy's, it really is Amazon. They just keep working you in. The area, the building I'm in, it's medium-sized [unintelligible 00:09:47], but you do get bikes, or some bed frames, or heavy car, bumper parts, and they don't care. It doesn't matter.

Every day, they change the rate. If your rate is $7.5 per hour for that day, it don't matter what you pick. You better get your $7.5 an hour. Even it's one, you will have a written up thing from the computer saying, "Go see the manager." You go to the manager, they don't even see, or they only tell you, they look at the laptop, "Look, the computer says you missed your rate here [unintelligible 00:10:10]." I used to work in a union in New York, I'm from New York, and I never ever put my name on the write-up. I tell them, "I'm not signing this." Just because I'm not the fastest, but I'm just below it, and they will write you up. It is not a maybe, it's not, "We'll think about." They'll write you up, and that's just how they do their job, that's how they do it.

Brian: David, thank you for your call. I really appreciate it. Of course, we can't vouch for or take sides in a particular lawsuit and know who's right and wrong in particular claims, but are there a lot of lawsuits that arise, Will, that would come from stories like David is alleging?

Will: I've heard stories like that from many workers around the country. It's very common to hear all of those things that he's saying. They usually don't end in lawsuits. These are worker comp disputes, for the most part. I think it's important to remember that this is, particular for Amazon, the intensity that they work the employees and the sophistication that they have for tracking their productivity down to the second, what he was saying about 98% of what he was supposed to do. The computer system knows when he takes a break and knows how many seconds between items that he takes, and is tracking that and comparing that across time and to other workers, and you can get written up.

People are scared to get written up, and they'll do things that aren't safe in order to hit their numbers, so they don't get fired. Some people just wear out. The other thing you mentioned was about the medical care he was getting. We found problems with that as well, where I talked to medical providers who were under contract with Amazon who said they were pressured to undertreat workers in order to keep their injury rate down, in order to keep injuries off the books.

Brian: Here's another current Amazon worker from the Bronx, he tells us. Thank you very much for calling in, you're on WNYC.

Caller 1: Hi, Brian, a longtime listener. I listen to your show every day. I just want to make a comment. I think what makes it difficult and what causes a lot of injuries is the close proximity thus far in the social distancing. We have drivers, there's so many people in the warehouse, there's so many movements, there's so many things going on, and as you mentioned earlier, yes, there is a fast-paced environment.

The demand, the space, and all of the stuff that's going on in terms of the virus and the social distance, and stuff like that, it just causes, thus further causes a lot of people to move. Those are the things, in my opinion, that causes these injuries with these folks. Amazon is a juggernaut. There's so many packages going in and out of these warehouses, there's so much movement. I just want to make that comment. I think that's the reason. Every day, that's how it is, especially with the holiday rush that's going on right now.

Brian: Can I ask, what do you think would make it safer for you and your colleagues while still getting the job done?

Caller 1: It's a very good question. It's a matter of space. The demand is so high that you need more space and the warehouse needs to be larger. Yes, it's a very good question. Honestly, I don't know how to answer it, other than saying that it's more space. If folks have more space because with the social distancing, that makes things a little tough. If that made any sense.

Brian: Thank you for calling in. It made a lot of sense. Be safe out there, and we really appreciate you shedding a little bit of light as a current Amazon worker. I do see, Will Evans from Reveal, that in response to your reporting, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, and others have called for an inquiry into Amazon's public responses to questions about safety. Are these members of the Senate calling for any particular changes that would be mandated by law?

Will: There have been calls from senators to take a number of steps to reduce injuries including changing some of the things we've been talking about lowering the productivity requirements, making sure that workers have breaks and time to go to the bathroom, and things like that, that might seem pretty obvious. You asked what is the solution here, and years ago, OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, told Amazon that they should institute job rotation, moving people to different jobs, so they aren't doing the same thing for 10 hours straight, have additional breaks in the day. Basically alerting the company that the way they're doing it now with these 10-hour shifts, or even 12-hour during the holidays, doing the same thing over and over again, is going to lead to ergonomic injuries and hazards. That hasn't changed. They haven't implemented those recommendations. They do have safety initiatives, they are putting in money into certain safety initiatives, but they're not addressing those core issues.

Brian: Here's maybe an interesting perspective on this. A physical therapist, Daniel in Queens is calling in. Daniel, you're on WNYC, thank you so much for calling.

Daniel: Hi, how are you doing? I just want to say that, I really sympathize with these stories. I'm currently the patient care coordinator, a hands-on physio care in [unintelligible 00:16:26] Queens. A lot of these cases we dealt with in the past we saw with these "victims" is that they're not aware of the services that are out there. For example, like we perform something called a functional capacity evaluation. Pretty much what that does is that we can see what the injury is, and we could give them an accurate test on when is the right time to return to work, and what are the things that they could and cannot do. What they do is they take these reports, and they send it to their employer, and it helps them have a good communication between the people they work for and what they can actually do when they actually return to work. We found that that really helps them.

Brian: That's really interesting. Will, I'm curious, if after having done this reporting, if you might have a question for Daniel, as a physical therapist working with some of these folks who are his clients from Amazon warehouses?

Will: I'm curious in terms of the injuries he sees, what does he think would lessen those injuries? What would improve the situation so those injuries don't occur? Are his recommendations to workers being followed, or is he seeing the same people back again and again?

Daniel: Thanks for the question. Again, I work more on the side of the stories that the patients happened after the recovery. I'm as hands-on as a therapist, I actually worked on a daily basis, but I do know that at the end of their process, we see that the results are really good in that way because the main thing is the communication line that they have with the people that they currently work with. It gives them a good starting point on limits the risk of things getting worse. We see that has helped a lot in the past. I must have answered your question.

Brian: I think that's a good answer to the question. Daniel, thank you for shedding some more light on this. Related to his call, Will, I see that one of your sources in Reveal's investigation was a physician who inspected Amazon warehouses as a medical officer for OSHA, the federal government's Occupational Safety and Health Administration. She found that Amazon's on-site clinics would send injured workers back to the warehouse floor instead of to another clinic for further medical attention. Was there ever any recourse about that?

Will: It's funny, well, it's not funny. Back several years, they were fined by OSHA a small amount of money for undercounting injuries, but not for what she found in terms of sending workers back to work and not getting proper medical attention. They never got cited or fined for that. She and OSHA went back two more times in 2017 and 2019, found the same problems they'd found, same violations, workers were not getting proper medical attention, and still no citations. These are repeat violations that Amazon didn't have to correct and faced no punishment whatsoever from OSHA.

Brian: Do you think, before you go, that COVID makes this worse? Your reporting is on Amazon warehouse worker injuries focusing on the week of Cyber Monday last year, that was, of course, before the pandemic. It sets up concerns for this year with so many more people ordering from Amazon. They've hired many, many thousands of new workers, as we cited at the beginning, more than 400,000, just this year, additional employees worldwide. Has COVID-19 made the risk of physical injury at Amazon any greater in addition to the pandemic risks themselves?

Will: Well, I don't have the numbers for this year, but I do wonder about that. You heard from one of your callers that there's an issue of space and having to social distance. I've talked to workers who said before you'd have something really heavy and maybe call for a team lift or someone else to help you pick it up, but you can't have them come close to you so you do it on your own, you might have additional risk of injury.

I also wonder, are people going to report injuries as much with the pandemic scare? A lot of people are foregoing visits to the doctor. Do you want to go to the health clinic? Do you want to go to the doctor to get something checked out, are you worried about getting COVID, and then is that injury going to get worse, is it going to get reported ever, or are you just going to drop out of the workforce? I worry about that. I don't know how that's going to affect the numbers, but it can't be making things better.

Brian: You know what, we just got a caller who I think says, he works for Amazon and wants to defend the company a little bit on how they treat their workers in this regard. Hi, you're on WNYC.

Caller 2: Hello?

Brian: Hi.

Caller 2: Hi. I do not work as a fulfillment associate, but I do work with the fulfillment centers. I've been to many sites in many different states, many sites of many different types. Amazon has endless types of buildings for different parts of the market. I would like to answer a lot of questions. I'm heartbroken to hear some of these things that I'm hearing. If you fill in the blanks, some of this is part of my role.

There are policies in place for nearly all of the issues you guys are bringing up. It is so sad to hear that people are having these problems. Amazon will make or break you based on who your manager is. If you have an assignment in any job ever, if you have bad management, you're just going to have an awful time. Repetition is wholly an issue, I heard that talked about multiple times.

Amazon has loads of policies and procedures. They're slowly moving to globalize standards so that they meet the highest standard across the board in their entire business, so it's not different in this country versus that country. Whether it be how they deal with hazmat materials, whether it be ergonomics, whatever the case may be, robotics, OSHA compliance models, all these different things.

I work as EMT as well. I have for quite some time, but a part of a decade, I've been to warehouses that are not Amazon, I've been to other Fortune 100 company warehouses that are wholly disgusting. I've seen some serious, serious injuries that I have never seen at an Amazon facility, and they never have anyone on site. If you go at night, if you go on the weekend, there's no one there. There's a guy with a white hat that walks around or a girl that works a 9 to 5, they punched a clock, and if there's an emergency, they call 911.

Amazon, if they have headcount for all these larger facilities, has what they call a safety specialist. They have an on-site medical representative, which is an EMT, which works within the confines of OSHA, but not as an EMT. They provide what's considered OSHA basic first aid through 29 CFR 1910, which is an OSHA standard. I've never seen a business model anywhere where there is 20 hours of coverage for a 24-hour facility.

The reason you're going to see such high reporting rates, especially I mean [unintelligible 00:24:31] is probably the site you're talking about in New York City. The reason you see these super high rates is because they are so present, and that's something to really take into account for. Automation that you bring up can definitely play into it. I can see where people are coming from. I think that's a valid concern, but again, there's job rotation policies. If they're not following them, people are going to get hurt.

The question then becomes, is your HR buying into their policy? Are they treating associates with respect? Yes, there's a write-up, but this is also an appeals committee. If you have a write-up, you have the right to bring it up, but if your site's not listening to you, then you're going to have a bad experience, and if you have a bad experience, are you calling the ethics hotline?

Brian: It's so interesting. We're going to have to leave it there with this call because we're out flat out of time for the segment. We're over time and we have enough another guest standing by. I really appreciate you calling in with all of that. Finish up on that for just a few seconds, Will Evans from Reveal. The new wrangle that that caller adds is-- It's interesting that we had a current warehouse worker who wanted a call anonymously, and a current inspector, that guy who wanted to call anonymously, but he's saying it's really a lot of individual differences at particular facilities and how good the boss is.

Will: Yes, there is some truth to that in the sense that it does it matters who your manager is. Some of these warehouses have lower injury rates. Some of them have higher injury rates, but across the board, if you put them all together, the injury rates nationally is, again, more than double the industry average. It's been going up, so why is it getting worse?

Brian: We have to leave it there with Will Evans reporter for Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. His investigation into workplace safety at Amazon warehouses is called Behind the Smiles. Thank you for your work and your time.

Will: Thank you.

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